National Evaluation Policy Narratives: The Happening of Kenya's National Evaluation Policy

Abstract

Despite the significance of National Evaluation Policies (NEPs) for good governance, there is limited understanding of how these policies are shaped or formed. Additionally, existing literature lacks a nuanced exploration of how NEP subgroups influence evaluation policy processes in sub-Saharan countries like Kenya. This dissertation identifies and explains the processes and dynamics of establishing national evaluation policies. Such policies strengthen and structure national evaluation capacities (NECs), including improving evaluation utilization and ensuring the transferability of these capacities. Specifically, as a case study, this research focuses on Kenya's NEP process and generates knowledge and insights on its response to increasing democratic and accountability space in the country. This study acknowledges donor agencies' history and extensive role in advancing program evaluation in Africa and affirms their central role in the evaluation policy formation process. It employs the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and Chirau et al.'s (2020) National Evaluation System Framing to identify relevant policy subgroups for NPF's meso-level coding and analysis. This qualitative study analyzed data from key informant interviews, existing documents, and grey literature using established NPF codebooks. The analysis generated data points that helped identify and characterize the components of the NPF, including the policy setting, plot, characters (heroes, villains, and victims), the moral of the story, and the narrative strategies employed to sway opinions. Three main subgroup themes emerged from the analysis. First, the findings affirm that donor agencies remain dominant in Kenya's national evaluation capabilities, forming a coalition with the Monitoring and Evaluation Directorate (MED), the policy custodians in government. These two subgroups operated in unison and proposed provisions for MED's semi-autonomy while advocating for the policy's approval, making them the willing coalition. However, shadowy government bureaucracy resisted the coalition's plans, making the policy narrative unfavorable to them. Second, this villainy was shared, albeit to a lesser extent, by the voluntary organizations for professional evaluators (VOPEs), whose disorganization and leadership challenges caused confusion and discord among evaluators, diminishing their agency. Finally, the devil shift narrative strategy employed by MED and the evaluators suggests parliament's slackened evaluation efforts. Their role is understood; however, Kenya's parliament lacked sufficient capacity to engage in the policy process, except for one critical instance when they compelled a response from the Executive, hastening the policy's approval process. Overall, there was inadequate capacity within both the executive and parliament to support the policy process, leading to the study's key finding that evaluation capacity should precede national evaluation policy processes and not the reverse. NEPs cannot help when structures for supporting or implementing the NEP are nonexistent. Future research on national evaluation capacity should further investigate the role of government bureaucracy in advancing program evaluation and explore ways to engage them more effectively in national evaluation policy processes. The changing aid environment and the implications of Africa's overreliance on donor support for program evaluation can also be explored.